Chris J. Politzki’s Blog

SEO Related, Search Future of Search, Google, Keywords, Search, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Everybody Catch the Google Pac-Man Feature Today?

If you didn’t, it’s up for another 48 hours to commemorate the anniversary of the game 30 years ago in Japan. Make sure you don’t just breeze past the initial Google Search screen, which usually updates with a doodle version of the original logo from time to time depending on the holiday, time of year and so forth. Instead, click on the insert coin and play a game of Pac-Man courtesy of Google!

Make sure to share with all you friends and family before this feature is taken down!

Chris J. Politzki

Studio 119 Degrees Web Design & Development Studio

Design Related, Search, Uncategorized arcade game, Future of Search, Google, Pac-Man, Pacman, Search

I recently found this hilarious clip on YouTube on Twitter and it’s effect on people and thought I’d share.

Enjoy!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Social Media Related Future of Search, Search, Social Media, Twitter

I recently was describing the Google SearchWiki and thought I’d expand on Google’s crafting of the user’s search experience. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Hard to tell. I think Google has good intentions, but if this data got into the wrong hands, it could be very dangerous to a person’s privacy and safety on the internet.

So what am I talking about? Let’s start by asking whether or not you have a Google Account or not? This usually consists of having a ‘GMail‘ e-mail address. If you do have a Google Account and perform a Google Search, notice something I’ve circled in the image below.

Notice that the results that are listed have been ‘Customized based on recent search activity’. If you click on ‘More details’, we’ll explore this a bit more. Keep in mind, you must be logged into your gmail account to see this.

Once we click on ‘More details’, the below appears:

Here’s where it’s revealed what’s really happening behind the scenes. Google mentions:

When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you’re signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history.

Furthermore, they go on to say:

For privacy reasons, this information is only kept for a short period of time.

This is very interesting as they are also concerned with privacy just as I am or you may be after now discovering that ‘Google’ is watching you. Almost very 1984ish, George Orwell-like in my opinion. However, they do go onto to mention:

Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on the things you’ve searched for on Google and the sites you’ve visited. You might not notice a big impact on your search results early on, but they should steadily improve over time the more you use Web History.

See below:

To keep things even more private, they have asked for my password on my account again. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think early parts of this Web History feature held all these privacy concerns. Seems to me as they either wised-up or had some complaints.

In the google account I made these screen captures for, I hadn’t enabled  Web History and this is necessary to see what kind of information they are tracking. Perhaps in a near future blog I will show this. When you do enable Web History, this is what greets you below:

Then proceeding further, we enable Web History and see:

Notice how January 9th is highlighted in red. This means that there is some information on this day as to what my Web History was. Clicking on it reveals such information as to what I was searching for through Google.

So keep in mind when you are logged into Google, and decide whether or you want them watching you or not.

The question is also what Google will do with this data that they collect. Will they use it to cater results which are most popular overall? Will this kill SEO? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, keep a lookout over your shoulder!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

SEO Related Future of Search, Google Web History, SEO

Some of you may have noticed some new buttons / features to your Google search results pages last week. It seems the development team over at Google have decided to allow their users the ability to customize their search pages. This feature is only available when you are logged into Google. Google is calling this their ‘SeachWiki’ feature.

This newly released feature also has the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world waiting on pins and needles to see where things are headed with the way Google will use this data to craft it’s algorithm to de-emphasize ranking within search result pages when searching with Google. Some are saying that ‘Ranking is Dead’! Follow this previous link to view an interesting interview and article with Bruce Clay and his take on the future of ranking within Google and the importance of traffic. SEOs will now have to rely heavily upon looking at analytics, bounce rate, and traffic.

But I wanted to show everyone the new feature so that everyone can start using this to better cater their search results to themselves. It really does help find that site that used to be on the second or third results page and throwing it to the first page at the top! You can even delete certain listings that you don’t want to see. Obviously, creating a more customized search.

So at first, we’ll do a search for ‘Yellow Pages’ (as I work for one of the local internet yellow page web sites… ).

At first glance, you’ll notice the ‘Up Arrow’ & ‘X’ to the right of the listing. Under that there’s also a ‘Comment Balloon’ icon.

 

Allow me to go briefly over each item here:

Above, you will see how the ‘Promote’ button appears once you mouse-over it.

 

Once you click on this ‘Promote’ button it will not only move the listing to the top of the page, but it will also add another field below the listing where data is revealed as to how many people promoted or removed the listing and their Google Account names.

 

The ‘Remove’ button functions pretty much in the same way, except that when you click on it the listing disappears from your search results.

 

Not only can you promote or remove a listing, but you can also add a comment to remind yourself what you enjoyed about this site, etc. Or you can also allow other Google members to view your comments, which I will describe below.

 

What’s really interesting is what appears at the very bottom of the page:

 

 

There’s a line appearing with ‘Add a result’, ‘See all my SearchWiki notes’, ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’ & ‘Learn more’ links.

When clicking on the ‘Add a result’ this appears:

This allows you to customize your search results page even more by adding a site or page that you feel should be included within these results.

 

Clicking on ‘See all my SearchWiki notes’ reveals:

Clicking on ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’ also shows your comment, if you left one, or all the comments left by Google users for the ‘Yellow Pages’ search.

 

And finally, clicking on ‘Learn more’ goes to Google’s description of this new feature.

 

At YouTube, there is a SearchWiki video which better illustrates the new features in action.

 

As I mentioned the SEO world is anxiously awaiting to see how this new feature will affect rankings within the search results. Until then, we can enjoy customizing our search result pages.

 

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

 

SEO Related Future of Search, Google SearchWiki, SEO